


Tactile Communication

by Caedmon



Series: In an hour or less: Olicity in a jiffy! [9]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: "touch me", Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flash Fic, Fluff, Light Angst, Mostly Fluff, Olicity Flash Fic, Tumblr Prompt, but a little angst, you'll see :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4744709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caedmon/pseuds/Caedmon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver and Felicity communicate many, many ways...but perhaps the most potent way is through touch.</p><p>An Olicity Flash Fic, non-smut. Rated T for some mild language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tactile Communication

**Author's Note:**

> For the flash fic prompt "touch me".
> 
> Just the usual:
> 
> I own nothing but the misteaks.  
> Comments and kudos keep the muse alive and kicking.  
> clintasha-n-olicity.tumblr.com OR caedmonfaith.tumblr.com

Felicity is a very tactile person, and she always has been. She very much likes the sense of touch, likes to feel things slip through her fingers, to know something’s texture and temperature, to know how quickly it responds to her own touch. As a child, her mother was constantly fussing about how she would touch all of the blankets and pillows in the stores that they passed, then all of the pretty baubles that caught the light. Such pretty things shouldn’t just be looked at, Felicity always thought. They should be enjoyed with her hands. 

They should be touched.

Since the island, Oliver has used the sense of touch as a gauge to help him survive. The only pleasure he’s taken from his tactile senses have been sexual. It’s almost primitive in nature. There was none of the human sensibility of doing things just for fun...anything and everything he did was due to some baser instinct: survival, for the most part. His sense of touch was certainly part of that, and he sacrificed the feeling of luxury fabrics, cool, smooth champagne flutes and soft beds for whatever and wherever, but he finds being scrappy and utilitarian useful all around. It’s not until he meets Felicity that he starts really indulging in touch that’s just for pleasure again - just touching something because he wants to feel it.

When Felicity meets Oliver, it’s jarring to know that she’s met someone who shares this sense of pleasurable touch - but only with her. He doesn’t run his finger along the cool ceramic of a coffee mug just to feel how slick it is. He doesn’t delight in condensation on a car window beneath his hand. It’s just not...him. That part of him is long gone, it seems.

But they share touches together. 

When he comes home from a mission and he’s frightened, the angst clawing at him in ways no one else ever sees or will ever know about, she puts herself in his lap and wraps her arms around his shoulders, pulling his head to her chest so that she can stroke his hair and his back. She doesn’t need to say anything to him. Empty words of comfort don’t matter. She tells him she loves him every now and then when she plants a kiss on his head, but the real communication is done through her hands: when she slides them down his head as it shakes denials of what he’s just done and seen against her breast, and when her other hand smooths and soothes the muscles of his back that writhe and spasm with the sobs no one will ever know he suffers when there’s someone he can’t save. Thier communication comes in the way he clutches her so close, pleading with her silently to never leave him, never, please never leave him alone to face the demons that plague him that only she can make go away with her magic hands. 

They communicate when they lie together after loving and their fingers trace each others’ bodies, languidly mapping the landscapes they know so well, the communication limited to contented sighs, happy little sounds and the light dragging of their five digits. They don’t have to repeat out loud with words what their bodies just said and continue to say, but do anyway just to reinforce it. Felicity can feel the thud his heartbeat against her cheek, comforting and steady, and knows that his heart beats for her. He can feel hers against his palm as he strokes her back slowly and knows the same; this woman gave him her heart and that gentle thudding is his. Quite often, the contented sighs have nothing to do with the love they just made physically, but with the fact that they both know they’re so incredibly lucky to be with the person that fills that the heart in their chest to overflowing.

When they argue, as all couples do, it’s always Oliver who storms out before he loses control. Felicity always cries, because she’s a cryer when she’s angry, and she finds a place to sit and cross her arms to rub her upper arms and rock herself. She’s never aware she’s doing it, but it’s somehow comforting to her. Before long, she’s got her face in her hands, and that’s how Oliver always finds her. He can never stay away long: he has to come back and make things right...no matter who’s to blame, it has to be okay between them. Things have to be okay with him, or he’s not okay. She’s not okay either. Neither of them are okay without the other, and they both know it. They need each other now, they’re a matched set, and rely on the other’s wellness for their own well-being.

He kneels before her and pulls her hands away from her face, putting his hands to her cheeks as soon as they’re available to him. He doesn’t say anything, nothing needs to be said just yet. The apologies and rational discussions can come later. For right now, Felicity just leans into his touch, and that’s his cue to go up on his knees and crush her into his arms. She can cry on him as long as she needs - and she does. His shoulder is there for her, will always be there, and that’s the point of this moment. He needs her to know that no matter what, no matter why they’re angry, he’ll always be there and will always love her. So he just holds her and loves her, tracing his fingers through his hair, perhaps shedding a tear or two himself because of the awesome power of his love for this woman and her unconditional love for him. 

And when she meets him at the altar in the garden, taking his hand, the wealth of communication between them can’t be conveyed. There are words, yes, and vows are spoken out loud for all of their friends and family to hear. But the real vows, the real I-love-yous, are said between Oliver and Felicity in gentle squeezes as they look at each other excitedly, when he strokes his thumb across the finger he just slipped a white gold forever promise on, when she swirls her index finger absently around his middle finger because that’s just Something She Does and it’s just such a Them thing to do that it makes his heart sing. And then the officiant says those all-important words - ‘man and wife’ - and he’s touching his lips to his wife’s lips for the very first time. 

But Oliver thinks this may be the best touch of all so far. Felicity is lying on the bed in the hospital, curled on her side, trying valiantly not to be a complainer but failing miserably. He sits behind her, kneading her back until she swats at him and tells him to get the hell away from her, he’s only making things worse. He obeys, and within seconds she’s apologizing and begging him to come back and touch her again. 

So he comes over and strokes her gigantic, rock-hard abdomen, and although they’ve always communicated quite a lot through touch and avoided empty cooing words, this time he decides to go ahead and give in to the impulse to soothe her with words as well, praising her and telling her how beautiful and wonderful she is, and she can do this, she can do anything. 

She swats at him again and tells him to go to hell, he did this to her and calls him a bastard, but he takes none of it personally. His only concern is for her at this moment. 

When this one passes, he sits back down beside her and caresses her abdomen again, doing his best to communicate the wealth of his love and pride for her until she yells again and grabs his hand as if she’s falling into a black pit and his hand is the only thing keeping her tethered to sanity, and that’s when the doctor comes in and says it’s time. 

Forty two minutes later, Oliver realizes that he was wrong about massaging Felicity’s back and stroking her belly being the best touch of all because surely, _surely_ sitting on the edge of his wife’s hospital bed with his arm around her, stroking the cheek of the newborn his wife is holding, _his son_ , well, that is by far the best touch - the best _feeling_ \- he’s likely to ever know.


End file.
